Welcome to Britflicks, a site dedicated to supporting the British film industry. Here you will find all the latest British film news, releases, trailers and interviews as well as some great competitions prizes.

Review of GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

Francis Lee’s impressive and moving first film as director is an unsentimental gay love story set in a closely observed Yorkshire farming environment.

Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) is working the family’s hill farm single-handed after his father (Ian Hart) suffers a stroke. His grandmother (Gemma Jones) keeps house. It’s hard, remorseless work that feels like a life sentence for him when his classmates have left to go to university, and he drinks himself to oblivion in the local pub every night. His secret gay pickups – in a trailer at a cattle auction, for example – are used for one-off, quick, emotionless sex.

The farm clearly needs help and so his father recruits a handsome and talented temporary Romanian farm worker, Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), lodging him in a run-down caravan outside the house. At first Johnny is hostile and mocks him, calling him “Gyppo’ but Gheorghe understands that he’s doing this to deny his attraction. When the two men have to spend days and nights together camping out in a ruined hut on the hillside while the sheep are lambing, a passionate affair sparks off.

Using his personal experience of growing up on a similar farm. Lee evokes the harshness of the life, and people’s closeness to the landscape and the elements. Well-observed details show the day-to-day reality of lambing on the hillside, such as cutting the fleece off a dead lamb and putting it on a motherless one so that the ewe will accept it. Similarly, the sex between Johnny and Gheorghe starts off being rough and elemental – almost savage. But then Gheorghe brings something new to the equation, an awareness of a different life with different possibilities, of softness and communication, and the spark between the two men grows into a passionate love affair.

Josh O’Connor shows Johnny’s internal struggles with an unacknowledged sexuality that would be alien to the down-to-earth residents of his village, his feelings of being trapped and the awakening Gheoghe triggers in him. Alex Secareanu is equally subtle in his characterisation of Gheorghe – kind, empathetic, clever and at ease with his sexuality. Now that Johnny feels emotions that he’s always tried to suppress, he has to decide if he can acknowledge the love he feels for the first time and live life as an out gay man. Ian Hart and Gemma Jones are perfect supports as Johnny’s relatives. His father is frustrated at his disability, his grandmother sees much of what’s going on around her but says little. Both of them seem strangely able to accept anything Johnny does for the sake of keeping their farm going.

God’s Own Country doesn’t feel like a first film. Sometimes compared to Brokeback Mountain, it’s mature, assured and has an overwhelming sense of place and also a celebration of its beautiful countryside. It’s full of shots of farm life that only someone who’s actually lived it themselves could have known. Interestingly, like Hope Dickson Leach's Somerset-set The Levelling, it's another British film in which farming plays a major and decisive role.

The moving story about an unlikely and unexpected love is rooted in its Britishness. It’s also set in a Britain that could disappear when Brexit bites, with loss of the subsidies that keep such difficult and unprofitable hill farming going and the disappearance of migrant workers like Gheorghe, who will no longer have freedom of movement. It feels almost like a snapshot in time – for Lee as a way of memorialising his coming of age and for us as a memento of how we were once.

God’s Own Country has been critically acclaimed and among other international awards, it won the Best British Feature award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2017.